The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World

Somalia on the tip of the Horn of Africa has been inhabited as far back as 9 000 BC. Its history is as rich as the country is old. Caught up in a decades-long civil war Somalia along with Iraq and Afghanistan has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Getting there from North America is a forty-five-hour five-flight voyage through Frankfurt Dubai Djibouti Bossaso (on the Gulf of Aden) and finally Galkayo. Somalia is a place where a government has been built out of anarchy. For centuries stories of pirates have captured imaginations around the world. The recent bands of daring ragtag pirates off the coast of Somalia hijacking multimillion-dollar tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates have brought the scourge of piracy into the modern era. The capture of the American-crewed cargo ship Maersk Alabama in April 2009 the first United States ship to be hijacked in almost two centuries catapulted the Somali pirates onto prime-time news. Then with the horrific killing by Somali pirates of four Americans two of whom had built their dream yacht and were sailing around the world (And now on to: Angkor Wat! And Burma! they had written to friends) the United States Navy Special Operation Forces FBI Justice Department and the worlds military forces were put on notice: the Somali seas were now the most perilous in the world. Jay Bahadur a journalist who dared to make his way into the remote pirate havens of Africas easternmost country and spend months infiltrating their lives gives us the first close-up look at the hidden world of the pirates of war-ravaged Somalia. Bahadurs riveting narrative exposthe first everlooks at who these men are how they live the forces that created piracy in Somalia how the pirates spend the ransom money how they deal with their hostages. Bahadur makes sense of the complex and fraught regional politics the history of Somalia and the self-governing region of Puntland (an autonomous region in northeast Somalia) and the various catastrophic occurrences that have shaped their pirate destinies. The book looks at how the unrecognized mini-state of Puntland is dealing with the riseand increasing sophisticationof piracy and how through legal and military action other nations international shippers the United Nations and various international bodies are attempting to cope with the present danger and growing pirate crisis. A revelation of a world at the epicenter of political and natural disaster.